getting touchscreens to work with xorg in squeeze

rbees · 01-30-2012, 01:08 PM

Ladies & Gents,

A basic how-to is in the last post

I am wanting to get a touch screen working in linux. I have looked at a couple of how-to's but they are somewhat dated. The big thing is that they all use an xorg.conf file and I know that with debian squeeze the xserver config is done automatically now, the box I am using is running Squeeze.

I have used an xorg.conf with some systems with nvidia, and to stop that crazy touch-tap thing on touch pads. But I don't have any machines that are using one now.

So I am wondering how extensive the xorg.conf has to be to provide both the standard functionality and the touchscreen functionality.

It has been a number of years since I had anything to do with a manual xorg.conf setup and I have never been able to come to much understanding of how the auto-config works.

I have installed the touchscreen drivers and rebooted but I'm not getting any functionality. So I am assuming that I need to make an xorg.conf. Question is can I just define the touchscreen or do I have to go all out and set everything manually?

This perhaps better in a seperate thread but it all relates to the end goal. The guy I am working on this for wants to setup a couple of point-of-sale units. We were thinking of using serial consoles. Can the xserver work over a serial terminal? I have a st0 working but have not tried getting x to work yet. So is it doable or mostly a waste of time?

Thanks.

jefro · 01-30-2012, 03:35 PM

Generally there have been two major brands of touchscreens. They used to all be serial input devices but are now being used as usb devices. In all cases you tend to replace the mouse with this input device.

We'd have to know more about what you have.

Be very careful if you have to open a crt to change dip or jumpers on a built in model.

rbees · 01-30-2012, 04:31 PM

Thanks jefro

The touchscreen is connected via a serial port for its mouse input. I tried hooking it to my laptop with what I thougt was an adapter but said adapter turned out to be specific to a ups of some kind. Anyway I got no joy.

NEC AccuSync LCD72V
ASLCD72V
sn: MON1105F00347

I have it hooked up to a Dell PowerEdge 6650 at the moment for testing purposes. The standard ps2 mouse works fine and the graphics works a lot better than the old crt I had hooked to it before.

The system is Debian Squeeze fully patched as of today. I have installed everything that I think relates to using a touchscreen with it. Keeping mouse and touchscreen functionality is prefered but not a must. The clerk can learn to deal with it

jefro · 01-31-2012, 03:59 PM

Just better off getting rid of CRT's, between the energy use and radiation and eye strain (from looking into an Xray beam) they aren't worth it.

So the NEC has the touchscreen. Is it new and or known good working?

NEC owners manual ought to describe the serial bit rate and stop bit and parity. The go back to the old linux manuals for how to initialize a serial touchscreen.

Might also have to run a touch screen calibration program (well for sure you would)

See this if you haven't. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/XFree86-Touch-Screen-HOWTO.html

rbees · 02-01-2012, 05:32 PM

I hear you on the crt's, I only have 2 left.

That is until someone give me some more old computers to dispose of.

So far I have not been able to obtain any info on the touchscreen portion of the monitor. All though NEC built the monitor they ship them out to a third party to do the touchscreen installation part. So they were unable to help me obtain any info about it. They did send me a list of posibilitys and I think DTx is the company that did it.

I ran "X -configure " to generate an xorg.conf from the system to start from. I added in the following

Code:

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "X.org Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        .....
        .....
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Touchscreen" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Touchscreen"
        Driver      "elographics"
        Option      "Device"   "/dev/input/mouse0" # have tried /dev/ttyS0-3
        Option      "MinimumXPosition"      "300"
        Option      "MaximumXPosition"      "3700"
        Option      "MinimumYPosition"      "300"
        Option      "MaximumYPosition"      "3700"
        Option      "UntouchDelay"          "10"
        Option      "ReportDelay"           "10"
        Option      "SendCoreEvents"        "yes"  # have had this line commented out.
EndSection

The touchscreen is actually hooked to an add-in pci-serial card. The system shows 4 serial/com ports. ttyS0 ttyS1 ttyS2 and ttyS3. I have tried using inputattach to connect the serial ports but no joy.

I have also changed testing machines. It is now hooked to an HP Pavilion a1330n. Fully patched Debian Wheezy i686.

I tried using the tslib driver but the xserver would not launch with it.

I have a lot of this in the log, but not allways. It depends on which /dev/??? is used.

Code:

[    12.907] (II) Using input driver 'elographics' for 'Touchscreen'
[    12.907] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/elographics_drv.so
[    12.907] (**) Option "SendCoreEvents" "yes"
[    12.907] (**) Option "CorePointer" "False"
[    12.907] (**) Touchscreen: doesn't report core events
[    12.907] (**) Elographics X device name: TOUCHSCREEN 
[    12.907] (**) Elographics associated screen: 0
[    12.907] (**) Option "UntouchDelay" "10"
[    12.907] (**) Elographics untouch delay: 100 ms
[    12.907] (**) Option "ReportDelay" "10"
[    12.907] (**) Elographics report delay: 100 ms
[    12.907] (**) Elographics maximum x position: 3000
[    12.907] (**) Elographics minimum x position: 0   
[    12.907] (**) Elographics maximum y position: 3000
[    12.907] (**) Elographics minimum y position: 0   
[    12.908] (**) Elographics device will work in Landscape mode
[    12.908] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "TOUCHSCREEN" (type: Elographics TouchScreen, id 6)
[    12.908] (**) TOUCHSCREEN: (accel) keeping acceleration scheme 1
[    12.908] (**) TOUCHSCREEN: (accel) acceleration profile 0
[    12.908] (**) TOUCHSCREEN: (accel) acceleration factor: 2.000
[    12.908] (**) TOUCHSCREEN: (accel) acceleration threshold: 4 
[    12.908] (**) Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse0"
[    12.908] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFA
[    13.208] Not at the specified rate or model 2310, will continue
[    13.208] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFA
[    13.509] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFA
[    13.809] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFA
.
.
.
[    29.748] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0x18
[    29.748] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFF
[    29.748] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: 'Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0x18
[    29.756] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFF
[    29.756] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: 'Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronzize: '.' 0x18
[    29.772] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0x18
[    29.772] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0xFB
[    29.772] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0x3
[    29.780] Elographics: Dropping one byte in an attempt to synchronize: '.' 0x18

Changing /dev/ttyS? does not seam to affect whether the xserver will start or not.

rbees · 02-01-2012, 06:42 PM

the pci card

Code:

02:08.0 Serial controller: Siig Inc CyberSerial (2-port) 16550 (prog-if 02 [16550])
        Subsystem: Siig Inc PCI Serial Card
        Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 16
        I/O ports at de00 [size=8]
        I/O ports at dd00 [size=8]
        Capabilities: [a0] Power Management version 1
        Kernel driver in use: serial

rbees · 02-04-2012, 09:04 PM

I did finally find out that the touchscreen is actually a 3m system by calling DTx and giving them the part number off the monitor.

I am having issues with the 3m driver now.

For anyone following this note that the 3m .bin file does NOT return any usefull info when it completes. It does not report success or failure upon completion. It took me awhile to figure this out.

The first issue I have is that the init.d script does not use the correct start/stop run levels for debian. But that is not a big issue as I can just change the files when I get a completed install.

The second issue is that the ./Install script is trying to create a link but the file already exists.

Second note: the install/remove script will not run over a remote ssh session. It must be done locally, atleast on the system I am working with.

It accours to me that part of the problem may be that I have the install from folder where the install to folder is. Guess I'll try moving it out of /etc and run it again.

rbees · 02-06-2012, 09:01 AM

Success

After migrating the test bed to a third machine I have success. I would probably have success on the PowerEdge as it has an onboard serial port. The second test machine did not have an onboard serial port and I was not able to get the system to see the touchscreen when attached to the add-in serial card.

I used the 3M driver from their site. It does apear that there is some kind of java issue that prevents the 3M-Control panel from running.

How-to:

Download the 3m driver.

create an xorg.conf if you don't have one with # X -configure (creates an xorg.conf.new in /root. Copy said file to /etc/X11 and rename to xorg.conf and restart to make sure it works)

connect the serial touchscreen to the machine.

exit the xserver and test connectivity with # cat /dev/ttyS0 (or your serial port) you should get garbage on the screen when you touch it. In my case the font was then all screwed up.

make the MT*.bin file executable with chmod +x and run with ./MT*.bin (use your file name). creates the *.tar.gz file talked about in the readme. Success or failure is NOT reported on completion, you are just kicked back to the promt. You have to go look for the file to see that you have it. This took me a while to find out.

copy said *.tar.gz file to /etc

extract the driver # tar xzf *.tar.gz (use your file name) and create the twscreen folder.

cd into said folder

run # ./Install

On my Debian system there was an init.d script error. The install was not affected and functions correctly. To correct it I had to edit the /etc/init.d/MT* init file to reflect the correct run levels but did NOT rerun the install.

Restart to load the kernel driver (the touchscreen uses both a kernel drive and an xorg driver). At this point the touchscreen will NOT work because xorg.conf has not been altered to reflect the touchscreen. I do not know if the kernel driver can just be loaded with # /etc/init.d/TWDrvStartup start

Restarting again will create the correct xorg.conf file.

If all went well your touchscreen should work now.

jefro · 02-06-2012, 04:53 PM

Thanks for posting. We (I) didn't seem to help you much so sorry about that.

Those add in card sometime are real stinkers. Bios and chipset seem to affect what you'd think should happen. Real comm1 is best no matter the OS.

rbees · 02-06-2012, 06:46 PM

Your welcome, but you were more help than may be noticed at first. Just having someone to talk to about the problem can be a big help. The wife and the boy's eyes just glaze over when I try to talk to them about it.

Thanks again